Tips On Branding Your Event

Tips On Branding Your Event

It’s been about one month since the Engage!17 Luxury Wedding and Business Summit and I am still feeling as inspired as the day I left. I look forward to this event all year – not only do I love seeing my industry friends, but I always leave the conference feeling reenergized and reinvigorated to better plan and design my upcoming weddings.

Every year, the incredible creative team behind the Engage! conference creates a one-of-a-kind experience and there is never a shortage of unique ideas and inspiration. Something that I really admire is how every aspect of the conference is “branded.” “Branded” is a hot buzz word right now and is trending high in the events industry. Personally (especially coming from a marketing background in my previous life), I don’t think of this as trendy as I always love creating cohesive, well thought-out, and well-designed events for my clients. After all, it’s all in the details!

Below are my key take-aways and tips on how to achieve a cohesive and branded event.

1. Choose a color palette and run with it!

Each Engage event has its own color palette and since this was their 20th event, they chose “All the Colors” as their palette by incorporating many of the colors from previous events. They also used the location as inspiration. The conference was held in the Cayman Islands so sunsets (red, orange, pink) and water (blue and green) played into the decor everywhere you turned.

The color palette showed up in obvious places such as favors and linens, but was carried through every detail, down to delicious macarons in sunset-inspired ombre colors.

Photography: Rebecca Davidson

Photography: John Cain Sargent

Photography: Chad Munro

Photography: John Cain Sargent

2. Integrate a theme (without being cheesy!)

As I mentioned above, the color palette for this year’s Engage was “All the Colors.” The creative team took the popularity of the “All the” trend used in so many hashtags right now and completely exploited it (in the best way possible).

Photography: Janet Jarchow

Photography: Janet Jarchow

Photography: Love Life Images

Photography: Jenna Leigh

3. Work with your venue, not against it

Fresh greenery and pastel blooms are all the rage right now, but they would have looked out of place in the Kimpton Seafire Hotel, which is exploding with pops of bold color throughout the property. The hotel is very sleek and modern but also delights guests with touches of whimsy.

For the Gala on the final night of the conference, the creative team flipped the #allthecolors theme on its head by asking guests to dress in all white or silver. To be honest, I was really confused by this dress code when everything else was so saturated in color, but I do as I’m told.

We entered the ballroom to find it covered head to toe (or floor to ceiling) with panels of bold, bright, stripes of vivid color. Talk about surprise and delight! All of the other decor (including the guests!) was kept crisp white and it was magical.